How to Track Calories with the Apple Watch

Posted by Melissa Holt on June 23, 2019

For those of us with an eye on body weight, tracking calorie intake and output can be a crucial component in reaching our weight, health, and fitness goals. The Apple Watch can help you reach your goals in a number of ways, including serving as a handy calorie counter.

So what’s the best way to get an idea of how many calories you should consume in a day? Well, you could use a TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) calculator, which lets you plug in your stats to get an estimate of how much you should eat to maintain your weight (or change it!).

But if you’ve got an Apple Watch, you can actually check your stats on your paired iPhone to see that same info, which you may find to be more accurate since it’s tracking your actual activity levels rather than relying on estimates that you plug into a TDEE calculator.

The Apple Watch and iPhone combination has become a very popular calorie counting combination.

This TechJunkie tutorial will show your how you can track calories using your Apple Watch combined with your iPhone, enabling you determine goals for caloric intake, act on those goals, and measure your progress every step of the way!

Apple Watch Calorie Tracker

Check the numbers for “Active Energy” (the calories you’ve burned while working out) and “Resting Energy” (the calories you’ve burned at rest). If you add those together, you’ll get a good estimate for the total number of calories you’re burning each day and then you can adjust your diet as necessary to reach your goal of losing, gaining, or maintaining weight. You can also use the calendar at the top of the screen to view this information for any previous days.

If you’d like a more comprehensive explanation for what Apple means by “Resting” or “Active,” the health app will show you a description if you tap on either of those categories.So for example, if I were as active every day as I was on October 25th, my Apple Watch thinks I could consume almost 2600 calories per day and still maintain my weight. (Geez, I want to be that busy so I can actually eat that much!) Of course, if you would like to be even more accurate with these numbers, you could add up a week’s worth and divide by seven to use an average of how you performed over the course of the week.

Finally, it’s important to know that your Apple Watch is using the age, height, weight, and gender info that you’ve provided to calculate these numbers. To make sure that information is correct, or to change it as your weight or age changes, follow these instructions:

launch the Apple Watch app on your iPhone

Tap My Watch

Next, Tap on Two Health

Then EditYeah, okay, I blurred out my weight. I’m not ashamed of it, but still… telling a bunch of folks on the Internet how much I weigh just feels weird somehow.